The Kansas City Star reports e-gov services provider NIC won a $30-$35 million contract from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Fresh off off getting recognized as ‘Public Servant of the Year’ in our 2011 GovFresh Awards, we asked the City of Austin’s Matthew Esquibel, Programmer Analyst Supervisor for Internet/Intranet Web Design in the Office of Communications & Technology Management, to share more about his work.
E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful neatly summarizes my beliefs on how society should work and provides the most appropriate slogan for the way I approach much of my life.
‘Small is beautiful’ best describes manor.govfresh, held this past Sept 20-21, in Manor, TX, and exemplifies where I believe we can have the most impact on changing how government works and where the open government community should turn its focus. The theme around manor.govfresh was government and technology, but the underlying premise was learning how we can strengthen community at its most local. So much is discussed at the federal, state and major metropolitan levels that we see small-town America as an after-thought. It’s not sexy, but it’s where change can happen faster and have a more immediate impact on citizens.
The official Texas government Website, Texas.gov, has a new makeover, including prominent search powered by Google, 24/7 live help, activity stream, open datasets, subscription notifications, social media directory, crowd-sourced customer service powered by GetSatisfaction and a mobile-accessible version. The site was developed “without tax funds through a public-private partnership” between the state and NICUSA.
In the spirit of innovation, we are happy to announce the launch of the City of Manor in open beta. Manor launched in alpha in March of 1913, and has been operating as such for the last 97 years.
What does open beta mean?
What missing from Gov 2.0?
The answer: Education.
Like most agencies, we have done a significant amount of research at the City of Manor to determine how we could best use new technologies to interact and engage our citizens. In the process, we have discovered that there is one element that is quite often overlooked within the Gov 2.0 movement- education. Citizen and employee education is critical to the adoption of new technologies because the technology will not be used if it is misunderstood.
We’re taking a poll on what dates work best for you on our manor.govfresh event.
When GovFresh first started, I got an email from Dustin Haisler, CIO of Manor, TX, who shared with me all the work they were doing there. At that point in time, I was new to ‘Gov 2.0′ and what could be considered ‘government innovation.’ I was skeptical. I never really thought government could innovate itself out of a paper bag. To think a small-town Texas could do it was completely laughable.
Was this guy for real?
A few months ago, I came up with a plan to understand our city operations and processes on a much more detailed level. After watching Undercover Boss last night on CBS, I thought I would share it with others, so that it might inspire you to do the same (no, I’m not going undercover).
The City of Manor’s open innovation portal, Manor Labs, has been live for a few months turning ideas into solutions. When talking with other cities, I find that the entire concept of open innovation is a bit misunderstood. It is very easy to put up a voting platform to rate ideas, but what happens afterwards? With Manor Labs, powered by the Spigit open innovation engine, the system is user-driven and self-sufficient. This allows our small agency the ability to process large quantities of ideas with limit staff involvement.
Here’s a breakdown of idea stages and functions.
Here are 5 more sites crowdsourcing citizen ideas to improve the way government works. See also 6 government sites crowdsourcing citizen ideas.
It seems like today so many agencies are plagued by the expenses of online web development and associated hosting. Manor was no different. Smaller agencies pay thousands of dollars to private companies to developed attractive websites that can be done at a fraction of the cost.
After discussing my frustrations with Luke Fretwell, the founder of GovFresh, he had a solution that would not only work for Manor, but many other cities as well. His idea was to build the entire site on Wordpress, which is an open-source blog publishing application, with full-social media integration. I knew of Wordpress, and had even used it for my personal blog, but have never thought of using it for a government site outside of a traditional blog.
Manor, TX: Local Government Innovation: Guest Dustin Haisler, CIO of Manor, Texas, discusses Manor Labs and local government innovation. Laurel Ruma of O’Reilly Media will also join us at the top of the hour.
Thanks to our friends at Spigit, Manor Labs now has a new look that makes submitting ideas even easier. Expect to see more great changes to the platform over the next few months.
Let us know what you think at innovations@cityofmanor.org.
Here’s a quick video explaining Manor Labs and our approach to open innovation.
Beth Noveck (Executive Office of the President/OSTP) and Tim O’Reilly mention Manor and Manor Labs at Web 2.0 Expo NY 09 (36:20).
The City of Manor’s open innovation platform, Manor Labs, is featured on the White House’s Open Government Initiative blog (Open Government Laboratories of Democracy).
Innovation is possible even in small cities with very small budgets. I hope that we can work with more cities to innovate new solutions for the public-sector.
Excerpt:
Just as the federal government is using online brainstorming with government employees and the public to generate ideas for saving money or going green, state and local governments are also using new technology to tap people’s intelligence and expertise. The City of Manor, Texas (pop. 5800) has launched “Manor Labs,†an innovation marketplace for improving city services. A participant can sign up to suggest “ideas and solutions†for the police department, the municipal court, and everything in between. Each participant’s suggestion is ranked and rewarded with “innobucks.†These points can be redeemed for prizes: a million points wins “mayor for the day†while 400,000 points can be traded for a ride-along with the Chief of Police.
Local governments and federal agencies are leveraging crowdsourcing feedback tools such as UserVoice to gauge citizen feedback. Here are 6 examples.
What other agencies are doing the same?
We’re excited to announce Manor 2.0: Live Government Innovation From Small-Town Texas, a City of Manor, TX, and GovFresh collaboration.
Manor 2.0 will document our Gov 2.0 efforts, including our innovation initiative, Manor Labs. Our goal is to share, collaborate and connect with local governments like ours who want to leverage innovative technologies to better serve its citizens.
Tune in to http://manor.govfresh.com and join us on our Gov 2.0 journey.
Voter ID and Civic Innovation
Since 2008, there has been a wave of voting law changes that impose barriers to the ballot box. Georgia Rep. John Lewis, a veteran of “Bloody Sunday,” called the new laws “the most concerted effort to restrict the right to vote since before the Voting Rights Act.” The right to vote is being chiseled away [...]